


The House

by VinHampton



Category: Original Work
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-06-02
Updated: 2014-06-02
Packaged: 2018-02-03 03:56:51
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,259
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1730249
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/VinHampton/pseuds/VinHampton
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Vin returns to her childhood home after making the decision to sell it.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The House

Vin had made a decision to sell her house, but that decision was still riddled with doubt that she could not explain. 10, Curzon Street in Mayfair was the house Vin had been raised in. It was a large house, with an original Victorian red-brick façade, and a basement spanning the length of the property, where the servants’ quarters had been over a century ago. The house had belonged to her father, and to his mother before him. She had not known her grandmother, who had died two years before Vin was born, but she knew she had been a young widow and the illegitimate daughter of a Duke, who had left the property to her mother after she told him he had fathered a child. The price was her silence – for a man in the grace of Queen Victoria’s court, siring a child by a simple chambermaid out of wedlock would have meant disgrace and the dissolution of his own marriage.

All Vin had of her grandmother was a name, Clara Mae, and an old photograph of the then 24-year old woman wearing a dark flapper dress and dark lipstick on full lips. She had light hair, deep brown kohl-rimmed eyes, and a playful smile. Clara had raised Vin’s father, Albert, in that very same house, where she lived until her son had her placed in a care facility when she reached the age of 75. 

Little Vivienne’s childhood bedroom had been Clara’s room once. It was airy, with high ceilings and two arched windows overlooking the back garden with its tall tree and well-kept rose bushes. From the small armchair in the corner, where she sat with her favourite doll, Hattie, and read, Vin could hear the parties playing out in the reception hall below her. Her father, being the owner of a Conservative newspaper called The London Daily, often hosted his friends, acquaintances and rivals to parties at the house. Vin’s mother, who was almost 25 years younger than her husband, and who had been blessed with striking features and legs that went on and on, relished these opportunities to schmooze and flirt with politicians, actors, athletes and diplomats, often fuelled by the confidence she found in a bag of white powder. 

Vivienne would hear her mother’s crystalline laugh, her father’s booming voice. She was not allowed to go downstairs unless she was asked to, on these evenings. Sometimes, Mike – her parents’ bodyguard, snuck up to her room with a cup of tea and a dishcloth filled with little hors d’oeuvres he had stolen from the kitchen when nobody was paying attention. He would sit with her in his lap and they would eat caviar sandwiches and foie gras on toast while he told her stories – fairytales and tales from his army days, all jumbled up in his Liverpudlian accent. Vivienne loved Mike – he was a tall man; a giant to a little girl, and he always called her his princess. When she could hear her parents fighting through the vents, Mike would always appear, pop a worn Beatles cassette into the player and dance with her – carrying her in his arms as he twirled her around and around, his laughter drowning out the yelling and the sounds of glass breaking. 

Vivienne’s first nanny was a young woman from just outside London. Her name was Margaret, and she had come to London in pursuit of fame. Taking a role as a nanny to Albert Hampton’s child meant she would be able to charm him into introducing her to his friends – or so she thought. Margaret lasted a year and a half, and left after she had had enough of the man’s lecherous gazes and wandering hands with no reward. 

Vivienne was precocious, and could string sentences together by the time she was a year old. Her second nanny, Imogen from Inverness, taught her how to read. Imogen was a middle-aged woman with no children of her own, who enjoyed slipping ‘liquid gold’ into her coffee while she watched Murder, She Wrote. 

After her, when Vivienne was almost five, came Inez from Valencia – another pretty thing in search of success. Albert made her his mistress and the little girl often wondered why Inez and Father so often disappeared together while Mummy was at the hairdresser’s.

Mummy, Jeanne, also wanted fame. She had wanted to be a model and certainly had the looks for it: chestnut-brown hair and olive-green eyes, which she inherited from her father’s side of the family, whom Vin had never met. She knew they were from Bordeaux, and she knew she had an aunt somewhere in France. Jeanne had married Albert when she was 25 and he was 50, hoping he would help her career. By 26 she had had Vivienne and, because the umbilical cord had threatened to strangle the baby during childbirth, had to be cut open – something she never did forgive her daughter for. 

Jeanne loved her daughter, but she did not know how to care for her. The baby was loud and messy and needy and it was easier to pay somebody else to look after her. 

As for her father, he always smelt of drink and cologne. He played the part of the proud parent on the rare occasions Vivienne was allowed to play piano for the guests at one of the parties. She hated them – the scratchy tulle under the dresses, the old guests smelling of powder and chemicals. 

\--

Vin leads the estate agent into the house. It has not been lived in in almost a year, and now seems entirely unfamiliar to her. It looks like a shell. The man nods, impressed by the size of it, the furniture. He points to the tree stump in the garden and Vin says it had become diseased and needed to be cut down. 

She does not tell the truth about the tree although she can still see, somewhere in her mind, an image of her mother with swollen limbs and a purple face, hanging like a strange fruit or an eerie Christmas ornament. 

She follows him around the house, going through the motions. She hates this house but still it has a hold on her. Maybe sentiment, maybe something else. She knows it’s been in her family for years and years and would feel like a traitor giving it up. Then again, she knows she owes them nothing, and using the money from the house to create her own home somewhere else would vindicate her. She likes that idea, and it is what had weighted the scale enough to make her decide to sell in the first place.

The estate agent insists he will be able to have the house sold very quickly – Mayfair is highly in demand, the house is in good condition, the façade is a selling point… all his words are a buzzing to her. They shake hands. Vin thinks of the new house she has set her sights on – its large garden, the conservatory, the bedroom with the window-seat, where she imagines reading to her own child, if she ever gets that far. She understands that holding on to a past, however hollow, delays the future, and she knows she cannot live on this looping, circling, liminal plane forever. It would not be fair to Holmes, and certainly not to herself. 

As they leave the house, she looks up and for the first time the house looks sad, with windows betraying the dimness of its eyes; the stones that are its teeth chipped and grimacing.


End file.
